"You were then angry and hurt," I said, "and began to devote yourself wholly to the pursuits of business."
"Yes," she said.
"Too," I said, "I gather, from other aspects of your story, that you became mercenary and greedy."
"Perhaps," she said.
"And then you were captured, and brought into the Barrens, and made a slave," I said.
"Yes," she said. "May I break this position?"
"No," I said.
"Do you like what you see?" she asked.
"You had better hope that I like what I see," I said.
She swallowed, hard.
"Yes," I said. "I like what I see."
"I suppose I should be grateful," she said.
"I think that I would be grateful if I were you," I said, "since you are a female slave."
"Of course," she said. "I do not wish to be quirted, or slain."
"Yes," I said.
"Do you enjoy posing naked women for your pleasure?" she asked.
"Yes," I said.
"Oh," she said.
"I think you feared your womanhood," I said. "That seems clear, even from your behavior in Ar. This is not unusual, incidentally, in a free woman, because deep womanhood, they sense, involves love, and love, for a woman, seems always to involve a bondage, if not of ropes and chains, of one sort or another."
She looked at me, tears in her eyes.
"Then, when you were, in effect, rejected as a woman, you were hurt and angry. You determined never to endure another such humiliating rejection. Too, understandably, you became hostile towards men. You would hate them. You would outdo them. You would have your vengeance on them. You came to fear certain sorts of feelings. You drew back even further from your womanhood."
"No, no, no," she wept, "I am a poor slave only because I am unresponsive! That is my nature! I cannot help it!"
"That is not your nature," I told her. "And you are going to help it."
"Master?" she asked.
"Crawl to the grass, there," I said. "Hurry!"
She crawled to the point, trembling, where I had indicated.
"Kneel to the whip," I ordered her.
She knelt there, trembling, her head down to the grass, her wrists crossed beneath her, as though bound.
I struck her thrice.
"Are you a whipped slave?" I asked.
"Yes," she wept, "I am a whipped slave."
"You belong to men," I told her. I gave her another stroke.
"Yes, Master!" she said.
"Are you going to be pleasing?" I asked. Another stroke.
"I will try to be pleasing!" she wept.
"I am sure you will, my dear," I said. "But the interesting question is whether or not you will succeed." I then gave her two more strokes.
"Oh," she wept. "Ohh."
"Do you beg now," I asked, "to return to the robe?"
"Yes, Master!" she said.
"Return, then, to the robe, Slave," I said.
Swiftly she crawled back to the robe. She lay on her stomach on its surface, grateful to be again within the perimeters of its relative safety. She was half choking and crying.
"On your back, Slave," I said, "hands at your sides, palms up, right knee lifted."
Wincing, she complied.
"What is the place of women!" I demanded.
"At the feet of men!" she wept.
"And where are you?" I asked.
"At your feet!" she wept.
"What are you?" I asked.
"A slave, a slave!" she said.
"Men have been patient long enough with you, Slave," I said. "That patience is now at an end."
"Yes, Master!" she wept.
"No longer are you a free woman," I said. "That is all behind you now. You are now only an embonded female, only a slave, at the mercy of men."
"Yes, Master," she gasped, frightened.
"Accordingly," I said, "you are no longer to think of yourself as, or permit yourself to act like, a free woman. You are now, henceforth, to think and act like a slave. You are to feel as a slave, and live and love as a slave!"
"Yes, Master," she wept.
"Slave," I said.
"Yes, Master," she said.
"No impediment exists now," I said, "between you and your womanhood."
"No, Master," she said, frightened.
I dropped the quirt down near the robe. I then crouched down beside her. "When I touch you," I said, "you will feel, deeply and fully, richly and beautifully, gratefully, joyfully and submissively, and later, when you yield, you will yield totally and completely, irreservedly, helplessly, holding nothing back."
"But then I should be naught but a slave," she said, "helpless in the arms of her master."
"Yes," I said.
She looked at me, frightened.
I knelt beside her. "Sit up," I said. "Put your arms about my neck."
She obeyed.
"Slave lips," I commanded.
She pursed her lips and then I, gently, kissed them. "That was not so fearful now, was it?" I asked, drawing back.
"What do men, truly, want of slaves?" she whispered.
"Everything," I said.
"And what must a slave give them?" she asked.
"Everything," I said, "and more."
"I had feared, and hoped, it would be so," she said.
I smiled.
"You see," she said, "I am a slave."
"I know," I said. She was a woman.
"Have you read the Prition of Clearchus of Cos?" she said.
"What is a former free woman of Ar doing reading that?" I asked. It was a treatise on bondage.
"'The slave,'" she quoted, "'makes no bargains; she does not desire small demands to be placed upon her; she does not ask for ease; she asks nothing; she gives all; she seeks to love and selflessly serve.'"
"You quote it well," I said.
"You have read it?" she asked.
"Yes," I said. I remembered the passage clearly. The girl had perhaps, at one time, memorized it.
"I have always been fascinated with bondage," she said, "but I never expected, then, to find myself a slave."
"Kiss me, Slave," I said.
"Yes, Master," she said.
"Do you fear now," I asked, "as a slave, that you will be rejected?"
"I see now," she said, "as a slave, that it does not matter. It is not mine to fear such things, but rather to see to it that I am completely pleasing. If I am rejected, it matters not, for I am only a slave. As a slave I am nothing. I am meaningless and worthless. Thus what does it matter if I should be despised and spurned? I must then, only, try again, seeking anew, helplessly, to serve and love."
I did not respond to her. I did not think it necessary to tell her, and she would, in any case, soon learn it, that the least of the slave's fears is rejection. Rather she must fear quite the opposite. She must fear that the very sight of her will drive a man half mad with passion, and that he may not wish to rest until he gets his chains on her.
"In the Prition," I said, "Clearchus, of course, is primarily concerned with only one form of bondage, that of the love slave."
"That is true," she said.
"There are many slaveries," I said, "and some are doubtless quite fearful and unpleasant."
"Yes," she shuddered. She had heard, I gathered, of certain agricultural slaveries, and of slaveries such as those in the public kitchens and laundries. Too, she was doubtless familiar with contempt slaveries and vengeance slaveries. One form of vengeance slavery is the proxy slavery, in which one woman, totally innocent, is enslaved and made to stand proxy for a hated, at-least-temporarily-inaccessible woman, even being given her name. The proxy, of course, being enslaved, is truly enslaved. Even if the hated woman is later captured the proxy is not freed. She is generally, merely, given away or sold.
"The common denominator," I said, "appears to be that the woman must be totally pleasing and, in all ways, is totally subject to the will of the master."
"Yes, Master," she said.
"You may now kiss me again, Slave," I said.
"Yes, Master," she said.
I then lowered her to the robe. Her arms were still about my neck.
"Are you going to teach me to be pleasing?" she asked.
"Yes," I said.
"You will then," she smiled, "be improving, as you suggested, my master's property."
"Yes," I said. "But I am going to do more than teach you how to be pleasing."
"Oh?" she asked.
"Yes," I said. "When I am finished with you, my naked, collared beauty, you will be quite different than you are now."
She looked at me.
"I am going to make you into a man's dream of pleasure," I said.
"Do so," she said.
* * * *
"Please, please," she wept. "Do not leave me! I beg you! Touch me more, please! I beg you to stay with me! I did not know it could be anything like this! Please, I beg you, touch me again!" She clutched me. Her tears were on my arm and chest.
"Do you beg it, as a slave?" I asked.
"Yes, Master," she said. "I beg it as a slave!"
"Very well," I said.
* * * *
"What a fool I was as a free woman!" she whispered.
"You were only ignorant," I said.
"I did not know what it was like to be a slave, the helplessness, the sensations."
I did not respond.
"I did not know such feelings could exist," she said. "I never felt anything like them. They are so overwhelming."
"They have to do with dominance and submission," I said.
"I was afraid, in my yielding," she said, "that I might die."
"It was only a small slave orgasm," I said.
She looked at me, wonderingly.
"Beyond what you have experienced," I said, "lie indefinite horizons of ecstasy. No woman yet, I speculate, has numbered them."
"It is so much more than mere physical feeling," she said.
"It is such feeling in a cognitive matrix," I said. "It is psychophysical. It is an indissolubly emotional, physical and intellectual whole."
"I shall now need, often, the touch of a man," she said.
"Yes," I said.
"You have done this to me," she chided.
"It should have been done long ago," I said.
"But now," she said, "what if a man does not choose to satisfy me?"
"Try to be such that he will show you kindness," I said.
She shuddered. She was now much more at the mercy of men than she had ever suspected she could be. The slave fires in her belly, as it is said, had now been lit. She was now susceptible to the torments of the deprived slave. Free women, whose sexuality is usually, for most practical purposes, sluggish and inert, often have difficulty in understanding the desperation and intensity of these needs on the part of a female slave. They think that she is different from, and inferior to, themselves. If they themselves should be enslaved, of course, they are likely to soon revise these opinions. They, too, then may well find themselves moaning and scratching in their kennels, begging rude keepers for their touch, and being despised, in turn, by free women.
"You have ruined me for freedom," she said.
"Do you object?" I asked.
"No," she said. "I want to be a slave. I love being a slave."
"That is fortunate," I said, "for that is what you are."
"I have been a slave for months," she said. "I regret only that I have wasted all this time. I have waited until today to discover what it can be, truly, to be a slave."
"What do you feel about men?" I asked.
"They are interesting and beautiful," she said.
"Beautiful?" I asked.
"To my eyes," she smiled.
"And what else?" I asked.
"I know that they are my masters, that I need their touch and that I wish to serve them."
"Can you conceive of yourself kneeling before a man, head down, begging him for his caress?" I asked.
"Clearly," she said, "now that my sexuality has been awakened."
"Will he accede to your plea?" I asked.
"It would be my hope that he would," she said.
"Sometimes he may, sometimes he may not," I said. "There may come times when you will be grateful for so little as a cuffing or a kick."
"I must accept what I am given," she said. "I am a slave."
I then took her again in my arms. "Yes!" she breathed.
* * * *
I lay on my side and the girl put a tiny piece of pemmican in my mouth.
I enjoyed having her feed me. She had, earlier, brought me water in her mouth, but, in its transfer, at the touch of her lips, it had only led to a new ravishment of her. I had then gone to the stream to satisfy my thirst.
"It is nearly sundown," I said.
"Then I must be returned to the herd," she moaned. "I must then be taken near the village with the others. I must then be hobbled and, a rope on my neck, my hands tied behind me, be picketed with my string. How can I bear, now, to return to the herd?"
"I doubt that you will now be long kept in the herd," I said.
"I now need a man," she said. "I will do anything to be taken into a lodge, to serve."
"You are helpless now, are you not?" I said.
"Yes, Master," she said. "May I leave the robe?"
"Yes," I said.
She went to the small hide in which the quirt had been wrapped. She picked it up and brought it to the edge of the robe. She spread it out there. "You told me," she said, smiling, "that this hide was about the size of a Tahari submission mat."
"Yes," I said.
"Behold," she said, smiling, her head down. "I kneel upon the mat."
I regarded her. A thousand memories rushed to my mind, of the vast, tawny Tahari, of its bleakness, and its dunes, of its caravans, of its oases and palaces. In the Tahari culture the submission mat has its place.
"In the Tahari," she asked, "might not girls, such as I, kneel on such mats?"
"Yes," I said. Many times I had seen such slaves, blond and beautiful, kneeling on such mats before dark masters.
"Oh!" she cried, seized and taken.
* * * *
The girl knelt before me on the robe. Her head was down. "I beg your caress, Master," she said.
I smiled. Well did she remember our earlier conversation.
I looked at the sun through the trees. I thought there was time.
"Earn it," I said.
"Yes, Master," she said, happily.
Later I held her, again, in my arms. "We must start back now," I said.
"I know," she whispered.
I got up, and gathered my things together. "Roll the robe," I said. She did so. Then she knelt on the grass.
"Bind my hands and arms," she said, "so tightly that I cannot move them. Then march me back to the herd, a rope on my neck."
"No," I said. "You will walk back, quietly, before me."
"Yes, Master," she smiled.
I tied my things together with the rope. Then, the girl preceding me, we left the small grove. I looked back on it once. I had had a good time there.
13
I Learn of the Presence of Waniyanpi
"Bring her forth, the red-haired slave," said Mahpiyasapa, chieftain of the Isbu Kaiila, standing before the lodge of Canka.
Canka stood, unafraid, his arms folded. "Winyela," he called.
The girl, frightened, emerged from the lodge and knelt down, near its threshold.
"It is she," said one of the men with Mahpiyasapa.
"It is she, who danced at the pole," said another.
"A pretty slave," said another.
"I want the woman," said Mahpiyasapa to Canka, indicating Winyela.
"You may not have her," said Canka.
"Speak, Wopeton," said Mahpiyasapa to Grunt, whom he had brought with him.
"My friend, Canka," said Grunt, "the woman was brought into the Barrens for Mahpiyasapa. He had ordered such a woman last year.
It was for him that I purchased her in Kailiauk, near the Ihanke, and for him that I marched her eastward on my chain. The bargain was an old one, sealed last year. He is your chief. Give him the woman."
"No," said Canka.
"I was to receive five hides of the yellow kailiauk for her," said Grunt. "I do not wish, however, to have bad blood between two great warriors of the Isbu. Give her to Mahpiyasapa. I will forgo the hides."
"No," said Mahpiyasapa. "It will never be said that Mahpiyasapa did not speak with a straight tongue. When I receive the woman I will give you the hides."
"He may not have the woman," said Canka. "By capture rights she is mine. Mahpiyasapa, my chieftain, knows this. Mahpiyasapa, my chieftain, is Kaiila. He will not violate the customs of the Kaiila."
"There is truly to be peace between the Kaiila and the Yellow Knives," said Mahpiyasapa. "Watonka has arranged it. Even now civil chieftains of the Yellow Knives reside in his lodge."
"What is this to me?" asked Canka.
"You have not behaved well," said Mahpiyasapa. "The woman should be mine. As chief I could take her to my lodge. But as chief I will not do this. I do not want to make you angry."
"Let me buy you two women, and give them to you for her," said Canka.
"That is the one I want," said Mahpiyasapa, indicating Winyela.
"That one," said Canka, "is mine."
"I want her," said Mahpiyasapa.
"She is mine, by capture right," said Canka.
Mahpiyasapa fell silent. He was angry.
"I am sorry, my chief," said Canka, "if I do not behave well. I am sorry if I have not acted in a way that is becoming to me. Had it been another woman I do not think I would have hesitated to bring her, her neck in a rope, to your lodge. This woman, however, as soon as I saw her, I knew that I wanted her. I knew I could not rest until her neck was in my collar, until she was mine."
"I do not want her for myself," said Mahpiyasapa. "I want her for Yellow Knives. I and my fellows are going about the camp, gathering gifts for the Yellow Knives, kaiila and saddles, blankets, robes, cloth and women."
"I will give you a kaiila," said Canka.
"She is beautiful, and her coloring and hair are rare in our country," said Mahpiyasapa. "She would make a superb gift."
"Neither you nor the Yellow Knives may have her," said Canka.
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